Reinforcement of Low-Frequency Sound by Using a Panel Speaker Attached to the Roof Panel of a Passenger Car

Abstract

The woofer in a car should be large to cover the low frequencies, so it is heavy and needs an ample space to be installed in a passenger car. The geometry of the woofer should conform to the limited available space and layout in general. In many cases, the passengers feel that the low-frequency contents are not satisfactory although the speaker specification covers the low frequencies. In this work, a thin panel is installed between the roof liner and the roof panel, and it is used as the woofer. The vibration field is controlled by many small actuators to create the speaker and baffle zones to avoid the sound distortion due to the modal interaction. The generation of speaker and baffle zones follows the inverse vibro-acoustic rendering technique. In the actual implementation, a thin acrylic plate of 0.53x0.2 m2 is used as the radiator panel, and the control actuator array is composed of 16 moving-coil actuators. The shape of the desired speaker zone is an ellipse, and the required amplitude of this piston source is pre-calculated to satisfy the desired sound radiation at the ear position. The gain of the actuator array to properly generate the desired vibration field is obtained by solving an inverse problem constructed by the transfer mobility between each actuator and field point on the plate. For the recruitment of the low-frequency deficiency of human auditory characteristics, the desired sound spectrum is set to follow the equal-loudness contour of 40 phons. It is confirmed that the woofer in a car can be replaced by the developed panel speaker.